Review: Bonfire by Krysten Ritter

'The past is a trick of the mind. It's a story we misunderstand over and over' 

I definitely came to this one because of Krysten Ritter as I don’t often find myself in the thriller genre. I really like Krysten as an actress, for the roles she plays and for how she comes across in interviews and on social media. She’s great at both writing, and playing, the broken but deeply resilient (even though they don’t always know it) character. You can see it in her writing as well, that she’s invested in the internal workings of a character, however messy they may be. There’s a lot of that in Abby Williams, the protagonist of Bonfire, who returns to her hometown as an environmental lawyer on a case.  Her main memories of the town are of being an outcast and of the strange ‘fake’ illnesses, and a disappearance, that befell some of her school tormentors all those years ago.

There’s a murky, slow-burning atmosphere throughout the book which is quietly tantalising, I did feel that the fogginess surrounding Abby’s memories after a night of drinking had a tendency to become a bit too much of a suspense-engineering-device. The revelations at the end of the book also unfold too blearily and quickly – bursting into action and ending all within a few pages after the slow build of the past few hundred pages. It’s intriguing and controlled for the first half of the book but starts to slip as it goes on and the balance is off, meaning it becomes a little confusing and less powerful.

'There are the people of the world who squeeze and the ones who suffocate' 

Ritter does write very powerfully about teenage girls in particular - the things they will do to each other and also the things that are done to them and the way they are seen by the world. She’s extraordinarily perceptive and those are the moments that have stuck with me since finishing the book. I recall reading somewhere that Ritter originally intended this as a TV series and I do think it would work well on screen, particularly the way the ending plays out and the setting of the atmosphere and flashes of memory. The legal/environmental angle was something a bit different for a thriller and I found the look at the way a faceless corporation can benefit and/or harm a community was engaging and very relevant to our society.

I would be curious to see what else Ritter writes as she’s clearly highly intelligent and creative and with a real illuminating interest in complex ethical and social issues. Bonfire was engaging and atmospheric for the most part, but I think there’s more to come from this writer.

*Thank you to Cornerstone and NetGalley for the chance to read and review this one